The Final Confession of Donald Draper

“I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name and made nothing of it.”

Thus goes the bottoming out we’ve been waiting for these past 7-8 years from Don Draper. His long dismantling, both self-instigated and otherwise, reached its endpoint in Mad Men‘s finale. Don’s marriage, his position, his children are gone–the various phone calls make that clear. Even his “niece” Stephanie refuses to let him be needed, going so far as to remove his last shred of agency, stranding him at the retreat center. Reduced to nothing, Don makes his confession to Peggy, vocalizing the sense of inadequacy and self-loathing that has always fueled him. A moment later, but not a moment too soon, the hand of Weiner intervenes.

Bereft and defeated and basically dead, Don is dragged to a “seminar” where he experiences what some might say is his first real connection with another human being–“Person to Person” as the episode’s title has it. The object of Don’s breakthrough, Leonard, is not like Don at all. Vanilla and Type-B where Don is neon and Alpha, Leonard shares nothing with Don except his loneliness–which, it turns out, is enough to puncture that very loneliness.

There’s a lot of talk about the fearsome power of “shoulds” in the seminars at this retreat, and Don spends much of the episode trying to do the things he believes he should do—go home to his kids, for instance, or take care of Stephanie. But Leonard speaks to a deeper “should,” the one that says we should love and be loved. “You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you. Then you realize: They’re trying, and you don’t even know what it is.” The monologue has Don’s rapt attention as he hears from a kindred spirit—someone else who’s isolated not by their failure to give love but by their inability to receive it.

But let’s back up. Some of us had taken Don’s demise as a forgone conclusion. What we got was something far riskier.

Perhaps I was slow on the uptake, but the first significant inkling that we might be in for the heresy of a happy ending came in last week’s grace-tastic episode, the aptly titled “The Milk and Honey Route”. I’m not talking about Betty’s tear-jerking reconciliation with her estranged daughter, AKA herself, or Trudy’s forgiving of Pete. I’m referring to the one-to-one instance of grace that Don plays out at the motel: He suffers the full consequence of a thieving bellhop’s transgressions (a young man who resembles him in every possible way), taking a beating and then making financial recompense for a crime he did not commit, without trying to straighten out any of his assailants or clear his name. Then, instead of punishing the young man in question, he gives him the one thing that remains in his possession, his car, taking the kid’s place on the bus stop bench. This act of radical generosity feels like the first (non-Peggy-related) crack in the armor of self-loathing he’s been wearing since day one.

The whole thing made me very curious to see what Weiner would do in the finale. Don had been reborn before–this final one would have to plumb some serious depths for it to be believable.

Given the choice between the lives of Mad Men‘s Don Draper (glamorous, wealthy, powerful, ascendant) and FNL‘s Eric Taylor (gritty, financially tenuous, scrutinized, downwardly mobile), most of us would choose Draper’s. But given the choice of which man we would rather be, the tables turn. Draper is defined by deceit, self-hatred, cold-hearted manipulation and loneliness, while Taylor is fiercely loved, has a strong backbone, genuine self-respect and is capable of meaningful relationships with others. He is the happier and healthier person, by far. The kicker here (pun intended) is that, as human beings/sinners, we are instinctually drawn to a theology of glory – to cast ourselves as the hero of our particular story, the master of our domain. We want to believe that we’re on the side of the angels, that if we dig deep enough, we can summon what we need to triumph. We don’t like stories about pain or defeat, however touching/honest they may be – we tolerate suffering only to the degree that it pays off – we want our Easter sans Good Friday, thank you very much. The urge is to see through our Calvary, rather than take it for what it is: a death.

That paragraph deserves an addendum. In this final arc, Matthew Weiner and co had the courage to see Draper’s story through. It turns out that Mad Men was one long theology of the cross. The ascent was a descent. Good Friday was not circumvented, remotely. Like the end of the Gospel of Mark, we catch only a glimpse of resurrection–the “new you” that the guru intones, mirroring the empty promises of Madison Avenue. Yet Don cracks the hint of a smile, and it’s enough to breath a final note of hope into a drama of despair. All the other tidy resolutions are hard-won (Peggy’s especially), but only Don’s resonates beyond a narrative level. Which makes sense, as he was always the one on the precipice.

The last gasp of the Old Adam comes in Don’s final speech to Stephanie, where he denounces belief (in Jesus) in the same breath that he espouses the same “keep moving” philosophy that has kept him digging his own grave the entire seven seasons. “I’m not sure you’re right about that”, she responds, and it is the perfect rejoinder to a man whose running has finally been forcibly curtailed. There is literally nowhere else to go but over the cliff. It’s either hug the cactus, or make like the opening credits and jump. I’m reminded of a verse from WH Auden’s “Age of Anxiety”:

We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Of course, if there was going to be uplift at the end, it wasn’t going to come from Don himself. As he makes plain, he is incapable of belief or change. But the grace of the finale is that Don’s redemption does not depend on his capabilities. Those only stand in his way. Hope breaks in on Don from out of nowhere in the inspiredly pathetic guise of Leonard, who, again, has “nothing to attract us to him.” If it weren’t anachronistic, a perfect song to play over the credits might have been U2’s “Moment of Surrender” in which Bono articulates what we’ve just witnessed on screen: “It’s not if I believe in love/ if love believes in me”.

My favorite article about the show remains the one that Daniel Mendelsohn wrote for The New York Review of Books in 2011, in which he theorized that Mad Men was essentially one long baby-boomer therapy session, the work of children trying to empathize with their parents and thereby forgive them for being human, Don Draper being a proxy for every high-achieving but emotionally unavailable father the greatest generation had produced. Abreaction as a path to absolution, in other words, a daunting task to say the least. Almost as daunting as turning an iconically dippy Coke ad into the first fruits of grace. But here we are. Smoke got in our eyes.

I appreciate the grace saturated ending, but I’m wondering if the end is really good (in the Christian hope) for Don.

It seems to me the title may not be about connections (despite it being a reference to phone calls), but Don’s acceptance of nothing, and embracing the void (which the retreat seemed to be advancing a buddhist schema).

His whole life was the anxiety of being (in a Heideggerian sense and an Existentialist one), always trying to be Don Draper and make the best. There’s a conflict between his anxiety and desires and the stable identity he wants to protect. It reminds me of the juxtaposition in the first episode between him in bed with the beatnik actress (her name escapes me), and him getting in bed with Betty at the end.

Weirdly enough, and it may be me, Leonard’s strange dream sounds almost like a commercial pitch from one of the many meetings of the show. The Refridgerator, the products, the family around the table, the smile. It’s eery and weird and I wonder if that’s why it broke through.

I don’t see the Ohm as a new birth, but the eternal echo from the sea of Being. Don is returning to the abyss. The promise, as I remember, is a “new you”, which could be resurrection. Or it could be merely returning and (possibly) reemerging as merely someone else.

The collage of characters were a series of people Don influenced and who, in my thought, all came to accept what they are. Peggy accepted that she wanted to be accepted and loved. Joan realized she wanted a career and to be taken seriously. Roger accepted he was old (more to this than I can think). etc.

This was the work of Don Draper. And this might be positive enough on its own (he made his impact).

But the Coke commercial killed me. As far as I can remember, it is representative of the end of an era. No more 50’s facade, the coporate ad is now hippy, cosmopolitan, loose. But, it is Coke. It’s a brand. It’s a sell.

I almost wonder if the spectre of Mad Men is a saccharine horror. The Market is far from a relic of old white capitalists, smoking in their boardrooms. Despite Marxist pleadings (represented in the underground throughout the show), the Market is not Capitalism. The Market will be wounded, adapt, absorb, regenerate and change face.

Don Draper is the Market at crisis. The end is a testament that the Market, with its commodification, spinning, pricing, etc. will survive refreshed. Hippy can be branded.

Yeah, that thought definitely crossed my mind as the Coke ad played, too. Was Don’s smile his final eureka? Had the perfect campaign just dawned on him, one in which he’d cracked the code of selling hippy values and leveraging the ‘harmony’ for profit (a new professional pinnacle) etc? Or did the smile indicate something deeper like newfound peace? The “new you” line could be read either way, and I think you’re absolutley right about Leonard’s speech – it sounded eerily like a pitch. Or at least, as close as you could get without it being one. So many of Don’s pitches have been veiled confessions after all – him working something out in public.

The reason I went with the grace reading was mainly because of the episode that preceded it, where the atonement aspect was spelled out so clearly (to forgive this kid showed that he was “on the road” to forgiving himself) combined with the lengths the show went to strip down every last one of his defenses. So maybe i’m being overly optimistic, but I saw the coke ad as evidence of his breakthrough rather than a repudiation of it–that in addition to elevating advertising to art yet again, his rebirth had given him eyes to see other people as more than just potential customers, chiefly because through his bottoming-out (and the interaction with Leonard) he’d finally begun to see himself that way.

Mr. Gleiberman sees some “gospel” in the last episode too, and it irritates the hell out of him:

“Don was supposed to be having an existential midlife breakdown, but as he ran out of gas, so did the series; it became forced and cryptic and didactically dreary. By the end, the show was practically shouting: “Don must change! He must find a new way!” But what Weiner forgot, or at least perversely put on hold, was exactly how much we loved the old way.”

So, I think you’ve got a right to be optimistic in your interpretation, even if some of find optimism the most depressing and didactically disconnected thing of all, given the concrete realities.

As for Glieberman, I agree with him that it was time for the show to end, and part of that had to do with the fact that the herculean Don who had hooked us in the first few seasons was gone (and who he’d become was dreary weary). Other than that, Glieberman seems to have had a very specific idea of what was permissible for Don to experience or ‘learn’, and is mad that the creator didn’t agree. It made perfect sense to me that Don would lose interest in advertising as he began to lose interest in life itself. It didn’t feel like a betrayal of the Mad Men ethos or whatever. The ending felt a lot tidier with the other characters than it did with him, at least to me.

I suppose there are only so many ways to realistically end these things, and if you want to close with a shred of hope and have it be remotely ‘realistic’, your options get even slimmer. Especially if a montage is mandatory…

To me the key is he was forced into staying. The “om” was the stuff of the times so appropriate but he had to quit running and trying his own way. “Keep moving forward.” Response: “I don’t think that works.”

I finally sat down and watched the final episode of Madmen. It seemed that most of the story lines were tied together in shiny “new” bows with the characters finding love or a new reason to do what they were already doing. And maybe, just maybe, Don Draper went on to create the Coke ad which might have been a result of his self-awakening. That’s what imagination is for, I guess. Mr. Weiner is certainly of a master of the ambiguous. But, the quote of the night goes to the encounter group member who so brilliantly stated: “Life is full of shoulds”. And, oh, that touched a nerve. Because it is – everywhere – and Mbird so eloquently tells us over and over that truth: The truth being that we all fail. We have all broken vows. We have all scandalized our children and We have all worn masks depicting someone we are not. We are all Don Draper. And, Dave, I did pick up on that beautiful scene of grace from the prior episode. It made me mindful of the story Dr. Rod Rosenbladt tells about the time his teenaged self wrecked his car while out carousing and up to no good. The story goes that upon confronting his dad of this truth, his dad merely hugged him and said, “How about you and I go out and look for a new car tomorrow” – Gut punching grace in the most unlikely scenario.

I enjoyed the Madmen ride. Perhaps it was therapy for me and my boomer people group as you quoted in 2011 from the Mendelsohn piece in The New York Review of Books. According to my calculations, I was a high school senior during the last episode, so it makes me a contemporary of Sally. She certainly dressed like I did (Good Lord!) and her dorm and home room looked like a Polaroid snapshot taken of my personal life. I felt at times that I was a voyeur looking into my own life, although my dad was a mechanic and not an executive. But there were parallels for sure. There were mistakes made and much scandalizing, but in a middle class way, but the themes were the same: domineering mother, absent dad, to name a couple. There were scenes in various episodes that showed that there is lack of knowledge in every generation: the time Betty yelled at the kids for playing with a dry cleaning bag – not because they would die from asphyxiation, but because she worried her clothes were wrinkled in a pile on the floor. I also remember the park picnic scene where the Draper family gets up from a meal leaving all of their lunch detritus on the grass. And, who could forget Betty lighting up a cigarette and downing a cocktail while pregnant? While viewing the episodes, I just came to the conclusion that my parents did the best that they could given the knowledge and resources they had and in the end, I realized I needed to put on my big girl panties and take responsibility — which good ‘ol Sally Draper did at the end.

It has been my experience that thinking I’ve hit bottom is an illusion. There has always been further to fall, which I’ve discovered subsequently, though I didn’t know it at the time. The drama of conversion has also always been an illusion, because there was always something left that was not touched by conversion. Mahayana Buddhism, in its Zen manifestation, says that the falling never stops; it also says that (to use the language of Christianity) the falling itself is grace: Nirvana is Samsara. Hitting bottom is not the moment from which conversion may spring, because hitting bottom doesn’t happen. Seeingones condition of falling as grace is itself the only, and the adequate, salvation, and it is exactly a salvation from striving after conversion, which is a striving after wind.

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